 Alright, so you want to do well on your rotations, you want to do well on your shelf exam and you actually want to remember what you learn on your clinical rotations, well then you may be asking, what resources should I use to help me do that? It's exactly what we'll break down in this video. Let's get into it. Alright guys, welcome to the MD journey, a channel completely dedicated to helping students just like you succeed on their medical journey with less stress through videos about how to study, how to be more efficient, as well as how to do well on your clinical rotation. So if you're new here, consider subscribing because we're putting out multiple videos each week and also consider hitting that like button to just let me know that you like content and want more like this in the future. And as a bonus, if you're interested in how to officially learn your medical material and kind of think like a doctor and make sure you stay to the very end to have a pretty cool announcement, let's get into some of the top resources to help you on your clinical rotations to get those honored, but also more importantly, actually remember what you learned today for the long haul. So one of my favorite resource to use to learn most essential skills that you may need as a physician, such as how do you read an EKG or how do you interpret a chest x-ray, things that you really don't learn well in medical school unless you get a good amount of practice. One of my favorite go to blogs and resources is life in the fast lane.com. So this was a website that I've talked about plenty of times on this channel that was originally designed to help emergency medicine physicians, residents, but really is a resource for all doctors of all kinds. So if you go to something as simple as EKGs, as you can see, you can essentially either quiz yourself or learn some of the most basic skills possible. Like how do you interpret a P wave? How do you interpret the rhythm? And it's just a huge resource to be able to evaluate things like how do you know if somebody has a large left atrium or a large right atrium? What's the difference? What do the EKGs look like? And as you go through more EKGs, as you kind of learn through the EKGs of your patients, you may find that it says patient has a large left atrium, but you really don't know what about that EKG points you to it. So you can use resources like life in the fast lane to have a whole section where they show you multiple examples on what leads to look at as well as different EKGs that you can kind of compare and contrast. And the beauty of this is every future EKG you have, you can eventually get better at that skill. I'm great now at looking for left ventric life, hypertrophy, left atrial abnormalities. But it's just because I've done so many examples on life in the fast lane as a medical student, as well as now as a resident. And life in the fast lane is not just about EKGs. You can also learn some really important skills at chess x-rays. One of my favorite things to do even to today is making myself go through the various chess x-ray quizzes where they present to you a case as well as a chess x-ray and you have to try to see if you can interpret and find the most common abnormalities. So for example, here is an x-ray of a 79 year old who comes in complaining of increased dyspnea. And then we have a chess x-ray from today, as well as a chess x-ray that this patient had from a year ago. And you can essentially compare and contrast what is going on and seeing if you can then find all of the abnormalities that they notice in their interpretation. And one of my favorite things about these x-rays is that it doesn't just tell me what's wrong with this one. So for example, this patient has an enlarged cardiac silhouette. Their heart is a little bit bigger here than it was before a year ago. But the bonus is that usually they have some clinical pearls and at times it's a PowerPoint slide of other x-rays that look like this. That way you can get more practice doing pattern recognition and looking at other x-rays that are abnormal and normal and being able to also understand when you should be concerned and what type of things you should be considering. So I've done this before with things like enlarged cardiac cellulets. I've done this with people who have lung masses and being able to identify them on your x-rays. And it's just a little bit of practice that you get better at over time the more you do. And as you may have noticed, they already have more than 150 different chess x-rays, so that's a lot of practice and you can become really good, really fast. Now make sure to add the links to all these resources that I mentioned throughout the video down below. So make sure you check those out. Now another resource I've also talked about on this channel but it's super effective, especially if you're trying to get practice doing EKG. Sliving the fast lane is great because it kind of teaches you the essentials and basics and it shows you many different examples. Maybe you just want to see an EKG and see if you can see all the abnormalities as well as all the things that are correct with it and potentially coys yourself on what you would do next for that patient. So one of my favorite resources is to do this. And I do this during like downtime, during residency where I'm just waiting for my attending to come. I may just do one or two EKGs on a website called EKG Wave Maven. And again, I'll link that down below. But it's a beautiful resource of intermediate, difficult as well as some easy EKGs. So that way you can get some practice of not only seeing one abnormality but seeing all of them in one collective picture and understanding what does that mean for the patient, what's going on and what should I be concerned about. So for example here, you can go ahead and just say view a random case. You can click kind of your level of expertise and you can click continue and you're going to be shown an EKG which you can go ahead and also increase in terms of your resolution and then coys yourself like what's the rate? Do I see P waves? What's the axis? What type of abnormalities? Do I see there's a T wave over here and large? And then eventually go ahead and coys yourself on what you think the answers will be. And the beauty of these explanations that it's really nice and detailed to tell you what the normal things are, what the abnormal things are, what to look for in each different lead. After doing a few of these, you find yourself becoming really good at identifying those little pieces of patterns that really do make the whole kind of situation of what the patient may have. So you get really good at looking at hypertrophy in the left ventricle or the array or finding P waves, things that are really difficult unless you do a few of them consecutively. So next resource which is used by a lot of medical students and residents in positions is uptoday.com. Now most people use this as kind of a short kind of reference Wikipedia kind of tool for medicine and trying to understand how should I understand this medication, how long does it last or how should I interpret or work up a certain disease process. But it's really used as a bite-sized piece of reference material for most people on their medical journey. But I kind of like to use it a little bit differently. So one of the first things that I will do is actually make a list of the topics that I've either heard about during the week or throughout the month or the rotation. And I realize that they are something that I'd be uncomfortable with if I was quizzed on it, if I was pinned on it or if it showed up on a future exam. So one of the things I'll do to fill that gap in my knowledge is I'll pull up up to date but I'll also go ahead and pull up like a note taking app such as OneNote or Notion or Evernote, whatever maybe Microsoft Word. And then I usually try to almost create like a huge outline on that one topic as if I was going to teach it to my medical students now. And it's a great way for me to go ahead and learn a whole topic using an amazing resource because up to date it has lots of references and percentages and kind of a nice breakdown and algorithms, but it also gives me kind of a big picture of you of how to understand the topic. So if I'm trying to teach somebody about renal tuberculosis, you may not learn about that very frequently or get enough practice unless you're a nephrologist. So one of the things I'll go ahead and do is just type in renal tubular acidosis and just pull up the most common example and then just briefly read about this and make notes on OneNote or Notion, something that I could have on my phone and then practice teaching that to either my fellow med students if I was still on my clinical rotations or now actually to my medical students as a resident. So it's a different way of using up to date. I still definitely use it as just a quick reference tool but this way it actually forces me to learn the whole library of information on one topic. And then I attempt to go ahead and teach that in a nice concise kind of chalk talk. So I have a few more resources to share but if you are going into your clinical rotations or if you're doing your clinical rotations already and you want a step-by-step approach on honoring every single one, I have a program that you guys can check out down below. It's called Crushing Clinicals which a lot of students and YouTube viewers in the past have actually been able to use and benefit in getting their ideal grades as well as their ideal residency spot. So that'll be linked down below. Now number four on my list of top resources to use on your clinical rotations is a book called Pocket Medicine. And this is a series, so they have their own versions for ICU, pediatrics and I'm sure others such as emergency medicine but I really recommend that you go ahead and just grab the internal medicine one. It's usually an orange or a purple book and just kind of keep it on the side of your white coat. The reason for this is that regardless of what rotation you're on, there's just so much bread and butter medicine that shows up on all of them. And so it's important to have a resource and just kind of quickly refer to and get the information you need. Now have an interesting way of using pocket medicine so if you're on your internal medicine rotation or something in medicine related, this may work for you but basically every time that I would experience or admit a patient with a certain problem, let's say asthma or pancreatitis or heart failure, even if I've taken care of that patient before, I'll go ahead and just flip through the pocket medicine section on that particular main problem. The beauty of this is that every time I do it, I always find something that I've forgotten or something that I need to remember to consider this specific patient. And again, just like your EKGs or your test x-rays, just get so much better at pattern recognition and that practice eventually becomes a little bit master. You know what labs to order, what things to consider, what scoring systems to use as well as what medications to use to treat that patient in the long run. And the ultimate effect of all of this is that you look more confident in front of your team, your residents you're attending, but you actually understand these topics. So if you were to see a patient in a year or two from now, when you yourself are in residency, you'll actually feel comfortable taking care of them. And my final resource that I love using on my rotations and I recommend that you do the same are pre-made Anki cards. Now, if you loved using Anki flashcards in your first and second year of medical school, you may be trying to use the same on your third year, but you by no means have to make your own. And I would encourage you probably don't because it just takes too much time, especially when you're going through a whole rotation throughout the day, you just need to be efficient with your studying. So honestly, just take the effort that others have put in and making their own flashcards and use these to study for yourself exams. I'll link down a few that I have and sometimes the links will go and come. So apologies if they don't work, just let me know in the comment section down below. But they're great for studying for each individual shelf exam as well as studying for things like step two CK. But those guys are some of my favorite resources to help you not only do well on all of your rotations and to build some of the essential skills like reading EKGs, chess x-rays and more, but also just becoming a competent future physician. That way you can use these skills, have that long-term retention. And by the time you're in residency, you can feel a little bit more comfortable than a lot of your peers. But if you do want to help on your individual rotation, if you want more tips on pediatrics, surgery, you want to know what best resources to use, how to study for your shelf exams, as well as how to impress your attendings, I'll link down below a program that we have on the empty journey called Crushing Clinicals. And many viewers through YouTube and the podcast have gone through it already. And they found that not only are they more confident and just less anxious on their rotations, but they're doing better, getting better evaluations. And a lot of our former students have been able to use that into getting into their number one residency spot. So I'll link that down below in case you kind of want a more step-by-step approach. And finally, at the start, I did mention a bonus about how to kind of think like a doctor how to perceive different clinical problems and become efficient when you do have to learn a new bit of information. So one of the exciting announcements that I have for the empty journey is I'm essentially creating a new series of videos where I will be teaching now different topics such as heart failure, pulmonology, different things that you will be seeing in the hospital as both a medical student as well as a resident. So if you want a nice, efficient way of how to think like a physician, go into a patient's room and be able to tackle a lot of the unknowns and a lot of the topics that may make you feel uncomfortable if you didn't have a multiple choice exam in front of you. That's exactly what this series has been to do. So if you guys are interested, I'm not sure when this video will come out, based off of when the program will come out, but I'll link it down below and that way you guys can get some more information. And definitely comment in the comment section below. Let me know what topics you want me to cover in this new series, what topics are really confusing to you and you wish somebody just made them easier, things like antibiotics, promise, I got you. But if you did make it this far in this video, first of all, make sure you hit that like button. It really helps both the video, the YouTube channel, and again, it tells me that you like this piece of content and I appreciate your support for doing so. That's basically gonna be it for this video guys. Thank you so much for watching. Make sure you hit that subscribe button if you haven't done so already. Appreciate you guys joining me on my journey. Hopefully that was a little help to you on yours. I'll see you guys in the next one. Peace.